A steelworker's union on Trump's tariffs

By NPR

Jun 11, 2018

About 300 jobs will be coming back to the Granite City Works plant in Granite City, Ill. U.S. Steel made that announcement this past week. That's on top of the 500 new jobs U.S. Steel announced in March. The company pointed to the Trump administration's controversial tariffs on imported steel as one of the reasons. Dan Simmons, president of the steelworkers union in Granite City, spoke with NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So one of the big criticisms of these tariffs that Trump has imposed that have benefited the steel industry is that other parts of the U.S. economy may suffer and that steel costs will go up and ripple through the economy. What is your response to that?

SIMMONS: Well, as far as the downstream industries that was squealing that it's going to negatively impact now their business, what I say to them - they've been profiting for too long off of illegal imports at our cost. They were getting cheap, dump steel. So, you know, I don't have much sympathy for those downstreams that were leeching off these illegal imports at the cost of our jobs in the steel industry.